SPARK

Notations are instructions for action. They specify what has to happen and when. In doing so, they follow a code that one must know in order to decipher them. But they also (almost) always have an iconic dimension that must be seen and intuitively implemented rather than read. Not only music can be notated in this way, but also completely different processes such as dance or fireworks.

Fireworks, in which scientific and artistic aspects come together and which, as a staging of war and celebration, always also have a social dimension, form a constant in Lea Letzel’s work. During a scholarship in Japan, she discovered the Hanabi-Fu notation of the chemist and fireworker Takeo Shimizu. At first glance, this notation looks like a musical score, but of course it specifies quite different things besides the temporal sequence: how high the rockets rise, how big the explosions are, what colour and shape they have.

How can the visible, which is itself supposed to represent the visible, be translated into the audible? The installation, in which different large cymbals are suspended at different heights in the room, has the effect of a frozen reconstruction of fireworks, in which the sound of the cymbals remains in the potential.

Duration: 20 minutes